* Posts by Marvin the Martian

1513 publicly visible posts • joined 2 Mar 2007

Rogue software consultant's vast stash of DIY explosives

Marvin the Martian
Mushroom

He'll still be charged under terrorism law.

Even pitiful teenager stuff (which theoretically can be upscaled) gets charged as "mass destruction" attempt, have no fear.

And here the unnoticed residue cause more damage than the shoebomber, so there'll be a fiery list of charges.

/Having just re-seen "The Rock", I hope they destroyed the house with a thermite bombardment; F14s or F22s over suburbia is always photogenic.

Man says he lost $500,000 in virtual currency heist

Marvin the Martian

Neal Stephenson would say so.

Cryptonomicon readers might have a clue.

But clearly the most practical application is contraband trade and tax evasion.

Marvin the Martian

You wouldn't?! What are you: can't think ahead, liar, or toff?

So you have $500k lying around that you wouldn't blink an eye over when suddenly disappeared?

Me, $5k would already hurt for months, taking a safety net away.

8m health records go walkabout

Marvin the Martian
Stop

"See icon -- What else is there to say"

Well... you don't *have* to say anything.

Especially for a lightweight story --- a Daily Fail worthy "blackmailer's starter kit", but on 8 million nameless records. Yes, a statistician can get some correlations out of it, but I'd like to see the resulting blackmail.

<<Dear Sir/Madam, as a male resp. female from London N7 you have a 12% resp. 9.5% chance of mental health problems, and 3.2% resp. 3.1% chance of diabetes --- give us £500 or we'll write a letter addressed to "Any Woman on this address" resp. "Any Man on this address".>>

Metro Bank in schoolboy email error snafu

Marvin the Martian

"I'm a customer and didn't receive the email."

What's your point --- you honestly thought your bank had about 1200 customers, namely the recipients of said mail??

No Gingerbread snack for Desire owners, says HTC

Marvin the Martian
Linux

What loyalty?

It's not a loyalty if you can switch it so easily. It's just a customer, not a groupie...

Brand managers think too much about themselves, and ignore the customer --- here, they may have consciously bought a well-reviewed OK looking Android branded phone, by chance an HTC.

Video vigilantes in trouble again

Marvin the Martian
Megaphone

It explains why CCTV is usually so rubbish...

For privacy reasons, CCTV images must be made unrecognizable? Kind of defeats the purpose, as evidence in a court of law.

Dam Busters dog dubbed 'Digger'

Marvin the Martian

"Sod human rights"

Sums it all up, really.

Hannspree Hannspad 10.1in Android tablet

Marvin the Martian
FAIL

"Spreken zie deutsch"?

What a car crash. If that's supposed to be German, it's a hat-trick -- three words, each wrong -- and as a bonus one has two errors in one. If it's supposed to be something else (Dutch?) it's even worse.

iOS 5 system files finger next-gen iPad, iPhone

Marvin the Martian

Breaking News!

iPad and iPhone product lines not yet to be phased out!

More details at 11.

RAF Eurofighter Typhoons 'beaten by Pakistani F-16s'

Marvin the Martian
FAIL

Re: Why buy Typhoons at huge expense...

... and then don't bother to train for a type of fight we will not see in their lifetime?

Hm hm. That's a toughie you came up with there. *scratches head* Lemmegetbacktoyouonthat.

Anyway, pilots are not expendable like squaddies; you only send in your expensive planes if you expect them to come back, as opposed to soldiers you send in and keep in with unprotected jeeps and no body armour.

Farting death camels must die to save the world!

Marvin the Martian

Cheaper to do it the traditional way?

I'm wondering about carbon credits needed to keep whirlybirds in the air; can't be little.

Alternative:

1/ Wait for drought (easy -- ongoing since 10+y... which means it's NOT a drought but a wrongly-assessed climate; they just counted peak rainfall years as "normal" instead of exceptionally wet),

2/ leave tap to drip (to attract camels),

3/ shoot/electrocute/club to death as desired,

4/ buy sheep (or harvest as above) plus 10kg dates

5/ build clay oven,

6/ cook camel stuffed with sheep stuffed with dates,

7/...

8/ profit!

Apple embraces 'n' extends messaging

Marvin the Martian

SPAM because of open standard? What utter tripe.

Spam is there because nobody foresaw it, whether standard would be open or not.

The whole mail infrastructure was built without any safeguards against spoofing --- just like you can post an envelope with any return address imaginable, they copied that system and didn't anticipate what a large volume of pesky sellers and outright scammers would follow.

[They were right in a sense, for a while --- the first ten or more years most junk mail was sent by your contacts: "if you don't send this to 5 friends horrible things will happen" type chain letters, similar but more prevalent as the mimeographed paper equivalents before (plus: bad jokes). Writing a sensible letter costs time & a stamp while forwarding "send this to 5/10 friends" letters (or off-colour jokes) costs a trip to the copy centre + 5/10 stamps --- while the sensible email stjill costs time but forwarding costs nothing. So of course the ratio letters:forwards went hopelessly awry. ]

Get your network ready for World IPv6 Day

Marvin the Martian
Paris Hilton

What's in it for HE?

[genuine question:] What do companies like Hurricane Electric get from it? They can't put adverts on your communications, and they have to steer all the traffic at some cost. What's the business model?

Also, it increases latency but presumeably also overheads? Negligible/noticeable?

Has Steve Jobs killed the consumer hard disk industry?

Marvin the Martian
Paris Hilton

Presumeably the iCloud stores the data somewhere? Or is it all RAM-only with tape backups?

So instead of dealing with pesky individual customers bloviating online about relative reliability of HDs (based on one HD in their life crashing) and thus damaging your reputation, SeagateWDToshiba can deal with the big boys -- amazon, apple, google, ibm; whoever runs a cloud -- and supply them with bulk orders. Not really their demise.

Tho spinning ickle disks may be out eventually in favour of NAND flash.

Brit censor stamps on The Human Centipede

Marvin the Martian

"If there are no children abused, there is no crime, regardless of what the law says."

That's clearly nonsense too. Put a good bomb making recipe online --- hey, no real explosives were used, nothing smuggled or destroyed, so no crime committed?

Fake-CP is outlawed for the obvious reason that it normalizes what is seen.

Germans completely humourless: Official

Marvin the Martian
IT Angle

The Dutch funnier than the Belgians?

Hahahaha. It's the pollees who made the jokes here.

Belgium is one surreal joke obviously, with 6 governments (or less when one or more fall for a year or so) and so forth.

3D-printed bikini goes on sale

Marvin the Martian
Facepalm

Shhh.... quiet.

Do you honestly think that the boyf would cough up 90 big ones if he didn't fully expect it to suddenly fall apart? What would be the point?!

Now, if it was programmable destruction that would be even better.

Feds turn one in four black-hat hackers into snitches

Marvin the Martian

Alternatively,

"1 in 4 hackers finds gainful government employment."

Ask Mitnick, it's a career path.

Two fat atoms get the nod

Marvin the Martian
IT Angle

Nice table, but why the label?!

What's the bleeding point of a table saying "coffee table"? And if you're too dense to know it's the periodic table then this is not the product for you [I have this lead coffee table for you then]. Without text/title it would look better (and the market would be bigger!).

You'd think a bit of style would go with that kind of money, but no.

All in all a poor execution of a simple idea (we've all seen similar tables, e.g. for a wedding present make a table with similar little boxes, and let all friends & families drop in mementos; or fill them with beach sand from every holiday you've taken).

Dear Ubuntu: The netbook is toast

Marvin the Martian

Reading fail

"Netbooks fading fast? So what? Excellent, that actually will _INCREASE_ Ubuntu and Debian market share in this segment and the overall market share."

The second part of that sentence makes no sense whatsoever --- if the notebook segment fades fast, it is implicit that overal market share will go down --- but the first part was described in the article, or do you have to go look up what "pyrhhic victory" means?

Marvin the Martian
Unhappy

It was a horrible article.

All the worse for being probably spot on.

Apple iOS 5 and iCloud examined

Marvin the Martian

Yawn.

As usual you've decided to remove the US sales taxes.

If you're really going to do price comparisons, you have to factor in differences in wages/houseprices/gov't services/NHS/.. etc.

Somerset council review criticises Southwest One

Marvin the Martian
Meh

Shock news: council writes what council thinks.

So a new batch come in and want to disagree with those before, so they commission a report from their underlings that writes the opinions that will be "facts" for the next four years (or longer, depending on local elections)? Colour me surprised.

Oxfam's 'Grow' world hunger plan: More peasants

Marvin the Martian

Devilspawn seed?

I would mostly take Greenpeace, the organic movement and similar charities/lobbyers to task over the "GM controversy".

The rubbish health worries ("grow extra heads") have been sold to the always-worrying middle class with a good helping of science fear and hyperbole --- so that you either reject the GM outright or reject the worries outright and use it out of context (like the "grow extra heads" comment above) to dismiss whatever displeases you.

The big problem with GM is the licensing and customer lock-in of epic, even beyond-Microsoft, scale: you have to buy sterile monsanto seeds every year (instead of keeping a fraction of your harvest each year, to continue the cycle), as it's the only one available to work with the necessary glysophate weedkiller. If prices fall, it's not a matter of having a monotonous diet anymore (you can only eat your own produce, until selling becomes worthwile again) --- it's a matter of losing everything as you cannot replant next year; leading to local food shortage OR profit for a transport company instead of a grower.

App Engine: Google's deepest secrets as a service

Marvin the Martian
Paris Hilton

What a strange logo!

An airplane that's all engine & wings but has no cargo whatsoever? Can the Strategy Boutique analyst please expound on this?

Lara Croft returns in next-gen Tomb Raider title

Marvin the Martian

It looks like

Somebody's recently seen "The girl with the dragon tattoo" and poured some of that sauce over the designs. Not as concentrated though.

Lenovo to swallow German PC giant

Marvin the Martian

This is madness!

Top of the market, meet bottom.

What next? In the UK, Apple buys Advent?!

Student suspended for posting random satire on YouTube

Marvin the Martian
Headmaster

Rules? What rules?

If you subscribe to a certain code, you agree to play by those rules; that seems a fair agreement.

So what you write, "you will not do anything against our rules while you are under our jurisdiction", should be answered by "yes".

Here however he's clearly not under their jurisdiction, he WAS not defaming the school or anything else that breaks that pact. So he WASN'T breaking any rules --- except possibly one of those unwritten (or so broad that they're effectively made-up retrospectively).

For example, we weren't allowed to smoke on the way home and/or when identifiable as pupils of the school; elsewhere and out of uniform you're obviously not under their jurisdiction (your parents' instead) so you cannot be told what to do.

That said, it's not clear to me why he's in that school --- of from any other place governed by a bunch that didn't foresee how this would play and disrupt their school as well as turn the school into a regional & international joke.

They are however probably preparing children very well for the world of 1950.

Marvin the Martian
Coat

Except if done in relation to the school.

If you drunkenly ride around town shouting at people and wearing school uniform, then yes -- you should be suspended for stuff you do off campus.

Which was not the case here. But now it is of course... So I guess they're justified now.

Fort Worth joins crusade against sagging pants

Marvin the Martian

Marching orders?

Probably more their Waddling warrant.

Cellphones as carcinogenic as coffee

Marvin the Martian
IT Angle

Save your life?

If quick phoning brings a lifesaving ambulance after a car accident caused by a distracted, phoning, driver --- has it then saved your life technically or not? Without there wouldn't have been a crash.

Entire London 2012 Olympics' cultural events database held on Excel

Marvin the Martian
Trollface

"Some of the largest companies of the world". So what?

Some of the largest companies in the world were/are doomed. Enron, Andersen Consulting, Lehman Bros, Nokia, etc. And a sledgehammer is a "powerful tool", which doesnt mean it's the right one.

Sheesh, why do I argue with a droid? As if a human ever would write or say "enterprise class analytics". [I suppose a trekkie might, speaking of Oracle implementations onboard. But the point stands.]

BOFH: Ready for the Judgment Day

Marvin the Martian
Pint

DNF on a credit card??

I hardly had a bankcard, let alone a CC, when I paid for my preorder.

See also Penny Arcade from earlier this week... In my case I've actually had 12 house moves since DNF's announcement, so any hope for paper proof of preordering is nil.

YMMV.

Microsoft becoming Apple with Windows 8 control freakery?

Marvin the Martian

Foot shooting?

I thought it were tentacles, not feet that MS has; and they have enough of them not to run out of them soon...

WW2 naval dazzle-camo 'could beat Taliban RPGs'

Marvin the Martian
Trollface

Hey Matt,

Why bother replying to "you're misspelling Bismarck" [a personal noun, so spelling is arbitrary] by someone with a grammatical atrocity in their login name??

Trolls and grammar nazis shouldn't be fed.

German cops unleash corpse-hunting vultures

Marvin the Martian
WTF?

"German Police locate McDonalds restaurant"

"Leftovers were ecologically removed from the dustbin".

In other words, there seem to be more complications, especially with those birds raised on frozen&reheated day-old chicks.

Student geeks build Rubik’s cube solving bot

Marvin the Martian
Boffin

"A cluster of Comp Sci students"

Is "cluster" indeed the correct collective noun here? Shouldn't it be a "cloud" now?

/goes back to feed his little Beowulf

Napster

Marvin the Martian

Just look at the "Blondie" illustration.

Zombie dinosaurs of the past, that's who we're supposed to spend our money on.

I think live performances in sub-500 person theatres is the only music we should spend money on.

3D printer produces working house keys

Marvin the Martian
Stop

Print a new one!

Easy once you have one shoe blueprint, the other is mirror'd.

And if your feet differ slightly in size (length/width), that's easily adjusted too.

I'm dumping my stock in Simpson's as we speak.

Stealth-cam software snaps laptop looter

Marvin the Martian
Linux

You mean, one seriously average person.

Bought a laptop last week on eBay.

I have now thousands of (SFW, natch) holiday snaps, 15gb of rubbish music, 30gb of OK films & series, all materials for a nursing course, expenses and budget list, copies council tax / passport / utility bills / ..., and an invitation to an upcoming engagement party (hm... better not show up).

Emailed the owner because I started to wonder if the lappie was stolen, but no. "Oh I thought I deleted it". Not zeroing out I understand, yes, but here not even an effort at deleting.

Biodegradable products are often worse for the planet

Marvin the Martian
Flame

Landfill should be outlawed anyhow.

The history of landfill is very short and twisted --- a few people got rich over it quickly (especially the mafia in italy) but that's about it for silver linings.

There was the idea that you can scoop large pits in the land to build new towns etc, and then fill those holes with the waste produced by those towns. There's no way these pits will be reuseable in our civilisation's lifespan.

MP headshot sex rating site: Gentlemen prefer Tories

Marvin the Martian
Alert

'Course they are.

They know to do whatever a man tells them to do.

Robot air fleet can launch mid-air from cargo plane's ramp

Marvin the Martian
Boffin

It's just a temporary measure

until we've solved the plummeting issue with the flying monkeys.

Seagate, WD should put a gun to Brussels' head

Marvin the Martian

Too much pressure.

Poor drive makers have to both fight of nagging consumers AND sneaky competitors. Is just not fair.

If we can reduce it to one company --- SeaToshDigital or so --- they can work much more stress-free and therefore to higher quality standards. You know it makes sense.

Ten... Core i5 laptops

Marvin the Martian

What about that 90%?

Is that 5.5stars? 6?

It's not an improvement.

Reg hack applauds asinine augmentation

Marvin the Martian
IT Angle

Forget naming the foal

Who spent time shaving half the mom!?

Billionaire Zuckerberg kills to eat

Marvin the Martian
Paris Hilton

Stop taking other people's credit.

Did you claw to the top? No, thought not. You just inherited your place from your parents.

/PH because she is a similar inheritance-achiever.

Marvin the Martian
Alien

Why only creatures?

Why restrict it to meet? Why not let him forage & cut all his veg too?

It's like those bleeding vegetarians, "oh cuty-wooty baby animal eyes, can't eat them" and then mindlessly kill all manner of magnificent plants. Damn green creeping bastards overgrowing my lawn all the time.

Maybe it's because I hate plants so much that it's the only thing I eat.

Naked cyclist streaks through Suffolk village

Marvin the Martian
Childcatcher

Especially the "there's a lot of children in the village" part

Ever been to Acton? It's as villagey as Slough on a bad day.